We Live in Tumbled Times

The statement, The police are investigating this as a hate crime always prompts in me the query: when it comes to murder, what other kind of crime is there? I realize that’s banal but I can’t help it. I think what I resent is not the recognition of a murderer’s motivation—which should never be obscured—but an elevation of importance in what strikes me as the wrong direction. To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I’d rather something else. The police are investigating this crime as an acute abjection. The police are investigating this as a crime pitiful as it is appalling, pathetic as it is monstrous. The hatred of a group qua group is, after all, the most debased and irrational of hatreds, the weakest, the most banal. It shouldn’t radiate a special aura, lifting it into a separate epistemological category. For this is exactly what the killer believes. He believes he did not walk into the church and murder a circle of innocent people, like a murderer , no, he went in there to express his “ideology” through the medium of violence, to commit his “act,” girded by what he flatters himself is a comprehensive philosophy.

We had dead people. We had casualties and we had victims. We had more or less innocent bystanders. We had body counts and sometimes even photos in the newspapers of body bags, though many felt it was wrong to show them. We had “unequal health outcomes.” But, in America, all of these involved some culpability on the part of the dead. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong skin color. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong Zip Code, wrong beliefs, wrong city. Wrong position of hands when asked to exit the vehicle. Wrong health insurance—or none. Wrong attitude to the police officer. What we were completely missing, however, was the concept of death itself, death absolute. The kind of death that comes to us all, irrespective of position. Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole, preferring instead to attack death as a series of discrete problems. Wars on drugs, cancer, poverty, and so on. Not that there is anything ridiculous about trying to lengthen the distance between the dates on our birth certificates and the ones on our tombstones: ethical life depends on the meaningfulness of that effort. But perhaps nowhere in the world has this effort—and its relative success—been linked so emphatically to money as it is in America.

Writing is routinely described as “creative”—this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.

"There’s a wonderful book called The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. In it he writes about how we have two places that are crucial to us, home being the first and work being the second. But equally crucial, because it allows us to function better in the first two, is what he calls the third place. These “third places” are bars, cafés, and restaurants. They bring people from all walks of life together and allow for casual interaction with others with whom we don’t work and to whom we are not related. As we know, particularly after a global pandemic, this interaction is vital for the individual and society as a whole in order for both to function well and flourish. I would argue that independent shops, perhaps especially food shops, also fulfill this objective, for the reasons I’ve mentioned above, and the loss of them to a tsunami of chain stores is a tragedy for us all"

Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation. 

I’ll put this out there first, since Bourdain was emphatic about one thing above all.

The most common English word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. It was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. Again and again, I watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” when they had done nothing wrong. I have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip—only to say sorry anyway when none was given.

After a moment, he said, real quiet, “I fucking hate my dad.”

Unfortunately, when people talk of the ills of fascism they often do a poor job, because they tend to depict fascism as a hideous monster while failing to explain what is so seductive about it. This is why today people sometimes adopt fascist ideas without realising it. People think, ‘I was taught that fascism is ugly, and when I look in the mirror I see something very beautiful, so I cannot be a fascist.’

"I remember how once we were over at our friend’s house, she’s a poet. I was listening to their endless grumbling: Gorbachev is all talk…Yeltsin’s an alcoholic…The people are just cattle…

It’s not that I discovered that members of the racist far right are inhuman, or monsters beyond comprehension. They’re not some entirely new species of being that requires forensic analysis and the dispassionate gaze of the scientist. They’re not uniquely stupid or uniquely mired in poverty or uniquely beset by social problems or even members of any specific socioeconomic class. They’re not monsters. They’re people. Just people, mostly men and some women, all over this country and this world, who have chosen to hate, to base the meaning of their lives on hate, to base their communities of solidarity on hate, to cultivate their hate with tender, daily attention. They are just people, people with an entire alternate curriculum of history, who operate within an insular world of propaganda, built to stoke rage and incite killings and for no other purpose at all. There are rich men and poor men, tradesmen and office workers, teenagers and men cresting middle age. They eat and sleep and sometimes drink too much and sometimes are sober. They’re lonely, some of them; horny, some of them; sometimes depressed and sometimes confused and sometimes joyful. They’re people, just like you and me. They could work in the next cubicle over and you might not know it; sit one seat over in class from you and you might not know it; live in your neighborhood, play on your sports team, and you would never know that deep in the night they trade photos of lynchings like baseball cards, and laugh. But I know them now, these men and women. I’ve seen what they write and how they talk and what they read and even how they sing. (Poorly.) It is precisely their humanity that angers me so much: The hate they promulgate and the violence they desire are the culmination of dozens or hundreds of small human choices.

But so much of life is structurally invisible", I noted, "and has no way of fitting into the external accounts of our lives. Our lives are so different on the inside. We can never express their full particularity and strangeness in public, their inner chaos and complexity. There are always so many things it proves impossible to say!" "Yes", said V, "but at the same time you can’t concede everything to the public account, to what people see or think they understand. In a completely different arena, for example, here in Paris I am Chinese. The public part of me, that is my face, speaks for me before I can, and so in the public accounting, Chinese is what I am. I cannot walk the streets with a sandwich board explaining my birth, my nationhood, my culture, my history, the history of my country and so on. That would be exhausting, impractical. But neither do I concede to their external definition. You have to be careful how much of yourself you render to Caesar